Here Engels noted that, although humans differ from other animals in being able to "master" nature, this historically has often had unforeseen negative consequences which cancelled out initial gains. He took as an example the way in which deforestation had wreaked havoc on Greece, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor:
Thus with every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature as over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature-but that we, with flesh and blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst. 68
Scientific progress was slowly providing the means to avoid causing ecological calamities by controlling and regulating "production activity" . But "this regulation" required "something more than mere knowledge" . It required "a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order". 69 This was necessary because:
The individual capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their actions . . . In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote efects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.70
The implication is that capitalism contained another inbuilt limit besides that of its inbuilt tendency to economic crises. It is that left to itself it could eventually destroy the very environmental conditions for any form of human existence, including its own. Neither Marx nor Engels developed this implication. But it would become very important a century later.
A dynamic and contradictory system
The recognition that capitalism is an ever expanding system of alienated labour runs through the pages of Marx's economic writings. It is a system in which people's living force is taken from them and turned into a system of things that dominate them. Capital is labour that is transformed into a monstrous product whose only aim is to expand itself: "Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks" .71 It is this which gives capitalism a dynamic of growth unparalleled in previous societies.
The Dynamics of the System
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